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Some
people do it with grits. Some people do it with
Those are the ways a lot of people draw a line around the
South. If your tea is sweet, you must be drinking it in Dixie. If
you're eating grits with your eggs, you must be breakfasting
below the Mason-Dixon Line. But even deep into the geo
graphic South, restaurants are likely to offer you a choice
about your tea.
And you can get grits up north if you know where to go.
John Shelton Reed knows where a person can get grits in
Boston. He has grits in a
Chinese restaurant whenever
he goes to Washington, D.C..
He's seen two McDonald's that
serve grits. One of them was
in Chicago. If the grits and
tea tests aren't valid, where is
the South? That's what Reed,
an eminent Southernologist,
wants to know. As an author,
editor, professor and director
of the Institute for Research
in Social Sciences at the
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Reed has spent
decades examining and
defining the South. As a
chronicler of Southern attrib
utes and attitudes, he needs
to know where the region
begins and ends.
The South is sometimes
defined by the boundaries of
the Confederate States of
America. Florida was one of
the 11 confederate states, but
there are good reasons to
exclude the Sunshine State
from a list of Southern states.
Most residents of Florida were
born somewhere else. Pulled
by cultural and familial links
to Saginaw, Michigan, Central
America and everywhere else
these people moved from; the
land of Jeb Bush and Mickey
Mouse hardly has anything in
common with itself, much less with the South. West Virginia,
on the other hand, was not a Confederate state. Yet the U.S.
Census Bureau includes West Virginia in its version of the
South. Of course, it also includes Delaware.
Reed's Southern Focus Poll tried to settle the Southern
question by asking people if they live in the South. An over
whelming majority of
Virginians, Tennesseeans,
Kentuckians, Texans,
Georgians and Carolinians
(North and South) said they
do. So did a solid majority of
people living in Oklahoma,
Mississippi, Louisiana,
Arkansas and Alabama. Nine
in 10 Floridians know their
state is in the South geo
graphically, but only 51 per
cent of them said they are
Southerners.
The percentage of self-
styled Southerners in Utah
(11 percent) and Indiana (10
percent) was higher than the
Southerner count in the
nation's capital (7 percent),
which is probably just fine with most Southerners. Only 45 per
cent of West Virginians, 40 percent of Marylanders and 14 per
cent of the people polled in Delaware say they live in the
South, no matter what the Census Bureau says.
“Clearly," Reed said, "some parts of Te,\as 3’en't Southern
and some parts of Maryland are—whatever you mean by that.
But it does mean something. As Reed said, "If yuu want to
map certain things, it turns out that again and again they kind
of pile up in the bottom right hand corner" of the U.S. map.
“Region is one of those differences that makes a difference."
But there are differences within differences, too. Reed grew
"Black and white
*
Southerners have a
good deal more in
common with each
other than they've got
with New Yorkers."
THE SMITH?
up in East Tennessee, a long way from Tara. In Kingsport, he
said, "We didn't have any cotton. We didn't have any Spanish
moss." Reed didn't get interested in the South until he went to
college in Boston. That was in the 1960s.
"Here I was from East Tennessee and people were asking me
all these questions about what was going on in Mississippi,"
Reed said. "I didn't know. Hell, I'd never been to Mississippi.
Plainly people in Massachusetts don't make that distinction."
Some people wonder if there still is a distinction between
the South and the rest of the country.
"I've been at this business
30 years," Reed said, "and
one of the things we always
talk about is, 'Is the South
still around?' People will dis
agree about that. I come
down on the side that, Tes, it
is.' It's not what it was even
30 years ago, much less a
hundred years ago or 150
years ago. But it's still not
the same as everywhere else.
We keep inventing new ways
to be different."
Kudzu has been around for
only a few decades, but it's
hard to think of the South
without it. Football was once
a New England sport. Now it's
a Southern pseudo-religion.
While it seems that the
nation is becoming more
homogenized—with a
McDonald's and a Wal-Mart at
every exit on every inter
state—Reed isn't worried that
the South will be blended
blandly into the American
salad bowl.
"A lot of these symbols of
homogenization came out of
the South," he said. Wal-Mart,
Holiday Inn, Coca-Cola, even
NASCAR and wrestling have
gone nationwide. So have
blues, jazz and country music.
Young non-Southe-ners, Reed
said, are even starting to say "y'all." A white Southern-born
person who says "y'all" and "ain't" in the same sentence is
liable to be asked in New York City why he or she talks so
"black."
"An awful lot of this that we think of as Southern culture is
shared across racial lines," Reed said. "Black and white
Southerners have a good deal
more in common with each
other than they've got with
New Yorkers. I should say
white New Yorkers, because
black New Yorkers are two
generations removed from
South Carolina."
Now that he's found the
South's basic outline, Reed
wants to fine-tune the bound
aries.
"Our next step," he said,
"is to look inside individual
states like lexas, break the
data down by county, and say,
for example, where between
Beaumont and El Paso people
stop telling you that you are
in the South."
This approach seems a most unSouthern thing to do.
Instead of trying to define the region down to the milepost
with polling data and calculators, the Southern approach
would be to discuss it. Sipping bourbon or iced tea, sitting on
a porch or around a wood stove. Southerners can masticate an
issue as if it were a plug of tobacco.
Despite his statistician's drive for precision, Reed under
stands this. At least, that's what he seemed to mean when he
said, "Southerners like to do it on the screen porch."
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